“... The list of Leonardo da Vinci’s accomplishments is long and famously various – painter, inventor, anatomist, mathematician, musician and so on – but it seldom includes the word ‘writer’. This is curious considering his enormously prolific output. His extant manuscripts and notebooks run to something like seven thousand pages (though some of them are very small) and this is only a part, perhaps about two thirds, of the total ...”

“... for greatness; Yeats was virtually an autodidact. His father, a wit, a good writer and a gifted painter who rarely finished a picture, was perpetually broke and shamelessly improvident. He wanted his son to be a poet, but seemed not to care much about the boy’s schooling; and however grim the financial prospect, he disliked the notion that his son, being ...”

“... social ruthlessness, breathing, eating, sleeping, dreaming obsessiveness of a great painter or musician. In war, the spiritual anarchy of the great general confronts the physical anarchy of its facts and masters them. Montgomery had that anarchic power. And his company commander, together with a thousand other dutiful servants of the ...”

“... Lucan would have been, or just possibly was, eighty in 2014. The second child and eldest son of George Charles Patrick (‘Pat’) Bingham, the sixth earl, and his wife, Kaitlin, much was made in 1974 of his ancestry, in particular the life and character of his great-great-grandfather, the third earl. In addition to treating his Irish tenants at the time of ...”

“... of it, rather than writings about the world!’ One of his most striking artist-heroes, the painter Fra Lippo Lippi, serves as his best spokesman among several in this. The poem begins with Lippo, who has been leaning out of the window for fresh air, deciding to jump for it: in this case the window is in the Medici palace, where he has been locked up ...”

“... of his incessant, unashamed repetition of themes and settings, which suggests the work of a painter (such as one of his beloved Surrealists) rather than a narrative artist. His stories stay in the mind like pictures at a grand retrospective, differing from one another in their superficial choice of colour or form but tenaciously exploring a ...”

“... much of the art that was looted, sold, hidden or damaged in the course of the war. Men such as George Stout and James Rorimer had to deal not only with the indifference to art of the Allied officers, and the antagonism and bloody-mindedness of the Germans: there were the practical and logistical problems of working in the heat and chaos of battle. There ...”

“... in steaming from his work in the fields, observed: “What an odalisque.” Bruce’s italics.’ George Melly is startled that Chatwin has never heard of the Muppets. Don McCullin, on a picture assignment for the Sunday Times magazine, rings at a grand house in Holland Park to find Chatwin standing behind the front door, ‘like Miss World’ – he ...”

“... like the equally impractical flying machine, was of anything like the same significance for it. George Grosz, an early admirer, concluded on meeting him in 1922 that he was an extremely stupid man; this would not necessarily have made him a bad artist, but it should perhaps lead us to take his theoretical contributions with a pinch of salt. What is surely ...”

“... Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voormann whom Lennon called ‘the exis’. Stuart Sutcliffe, the painter whom Lennon had recruited to play bass, fell in love with Kirchherr, a fashion designer and photographer. In most cases, the pop star’s rebel pose is laughable hypocrisy: successes in the pop world are egocentric, ignorant and conformist. Lennon’s ...”

“... the tragedies of life is that even the most tragic situations just fizzle out.’ This is close to George Eliot’s thoughts about the tragedy that lies in ‘the fact of frequency’, and it is what happens in The Grand-Dad. The executioner is robbed of his victim, the aristocrat is robbed of a stagey death, and the audience is robbed of the sort of finality ...”

“... The Morning Bath was the pastel most frequently discussed by reviewers of the 1886 exhibition. George Moore called it the ‘chef d’oeuvre’: ‘The effect is prodigious. Degas has done what Baudelaire did – he has invented un frisson nouveau.’ This frisson was nouveau, perhaps, in its gratuitousness. Not engaged in any activity, not presenting a ...”

“... Eardley’s paintings of the Samson children, they seem to have some common knowledge only the painter can access. They are fidgety children who become fixed with candour; they are tenement apparitions, scratched into the urban record, surrounded by a randomness of graffiti and change.Eardley’s short career is one of the most fascinating of her ...”

“... in a collegiate bohemian squalor that masked their class differences. Milo aspired to be a painter but his ambitions never really passed beyond daydreams, so he ended up a resentful office cog. Purdy ‘made his own money out of some of his father’s money’. The scenario begins as a mercy mission but turns into a power play, as Purdy tells his ...”

“... down his neck insisting on economy. It was probably only the support of the director, the painter Francis Newbery (an Englishman), that made it possible. Worse, the architectural climate in Glasgow was changing. Since 1904 the head of the School of Architecture had been a Beaux-Arts trained Frenchman, Eugène Bourdon, who was strongly opposed to the ...”